


Hunter's Moon

by MuggleMaybe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Community: HPFT, Gen, Halloween, Harry Potter Next Generation, Humor, Next-Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 18:35:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6999811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuggleMaybe/pseuds/MuggleMaybe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy expected Halloween at Hogwarts to be magnificent. She wasn't expecting deadly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunter's Moon

On Halloween morning, the Great Hall was ablaze with glowing jack-o-lanterns and gossip. I had grown up hearing stories of Hogwarts, but it was different – different and infinitely better – to be in it, to be part of it. I took my usual seat with the other Ravenclaw first years, where I found my two best mates thoroughly engrossed in a whispered conversation.

“Lucy!” Lorcan smiled mischievously, causing his brother to turn and face me as well.

“Have you heard what everyone’s saying?” Lysander asked, and I shook my head with the distinct feeling that it might be better to turn around and go right back to bed before they could tell me yet another crazy tale and, if history was anything to go on, land me another detention and another Howler from my parents.

Unaware of my regrets, Lys kept on, the words tumbling out of his mouth almost faster than I could understand. “There was a fire in the forest last night.”

“No!” I gasped, dropping my spoon back into my oatmeal.

Lorcan nodded. “It’s true, and the professors are being very hush hush about it. Word is the first damage is really odd, funny shaped, like it burned a path through the trees.”

“Why do I get the feeling you haven’t told me the real secret yet?” At my words, the twins exchanged a significant glance and the anxiety swelled in the pit of my stomach.

“It’s a Chimaera,” they said in unison, their round faces so excited that they were nearly as shining and bright as their blonde hair.

“We’re certain of it,” Lys added around a mouthful of toast. “It’s a perfect fit.”

“Ugh, can you please swallow?” I gagged. “I thought Chimaeras were native to Greece? And aren’t they super rare, anyway?”

“Right on both counts,” Lys agreed, seeming impressed that I considered Chimaeras worth knowing about. “Which is why we think this may be a _new species_ of Chimaera.”

“A new species, Lucy!” Lorcan squeaked. “It’s what we’ve been hoping for our entire lives. We’re going to find it and document it. We’ll do it all properly.”

“You know how badly we want to carry on the _Fantastic Beasts_ tradition. This is our chance!” Lys agreed eagerly.

I drained the last bit of tea from my cup and stared into its depths for a moment, harboring a strong but insincere resentment toward my taste in friends. I knew what was coming as surely as I knew Molly still wet the bed during her first year at Hogwarts. Cursing my own foolishness, I prompted, “And…?”

“We’re going after it tonight”—

“Of course you are.” Predictable, honestly.

“—And you’re coming with us!”

I choked down my bite of egg in a hurry. “What? Who says?”

“We need you, Lucy. We’ve got the creatures part down, and we’re born explorers, but we need someone for the science and the record keeping. You’re perfect for that!” Lys argued.

“Also,” Lorcan put in, “we like your company.”

They were crazy. Of all the dangerous plans they’d proposed, this was the most dangerous by far. They were absolutely out of their minds.

“You are absolutely out of your minds,” I said. “You do know what Chimaeras are, don’t you? We can’t just go out and _catch_ one.”

“We aren’t going to catch it, don’t be an idiot.” Lorcan shook his head at me. He had some nerve, acting like _I_ was the one who was off my rocker.

“Yeah, Lucy, that would be ridiculous. We’re just going to find it and make observations. That’s what magizoologists do. _Obviously._ ” Lys rolled his eyes at me and I promptly reached across the table and hit him over the head with a spare _Daily Prophet_.

“Come on, Lucy, don’t be like that,” Lorcan put on his puppy dog expression. “You’d never have any fun if it weren’t for us.”

I stood from the Ravenclaw table and picked up my books. “I’m going to class,” I said, trying to salvage some semblance of dignity.

“Common Room at midnight!” Lorcan called at my retreating back. “You know you want to!”

*

I looked at the clock on the dormitory wall. It was nearly midnight, and I still had ten pages of reading to get through for Professor Binns. Usually I went to bed at a reasonable hour, but the Halloween feast had been even more fabulous than I’d expected, and I’d gotten a late start on my homework as a result. I rubbed the sleepiness from my eyes and tried to focus on the page. Merlin, History of Magic was a boring subject. Along the side of my parchment, I began to doodle, drawing a lion’s head on a stout, hooved body, and adding a long dragon’s tail. A Chimaera. I leaned back in my chair, and wondered if the boys were truly going on their quest. They’d be furious with me for not showing up. Not that I’d made any promises. I’d been perfectly clear that I thought it was an utterly absurd idea. Still, I had to admit, it would be pretty cool to see a Chimaera, as long it I didn’t have to get too close. They were so rare. It might be a once in a lifetime opportunity, really.

With a long-suffering sigh, I pulled on one of Nana Molly’s hand-knit jumpers and slipped my feet into my trainers. Double-checking that my wand was securely settled in my pocket, I made my way down to the Common Room.

Why did I do these things to myself?

Lorcan and Lysander were already heading for the exit when I arrived.

“Wait,” I whispered. “I’m coming.”

Lys smirked. “We knew you would.”

“Shut up. I just don’t want to see you two loonies eaten by monsters.” I shot back.

“Aww, she really does care,” Lorcan jabbed an elbow in my side, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Quit it, you two. It’s time to go,” Lysander interrupted. He was always so serious when it came to magical creatures.

Cautiously, we tiptoed out of Ravenclaw Tower and along the corridor, peeking around each corner before turning and listening carefully for any sign of a Prefect, a professor, or, worst of all, Peeves. The Poltergeist had completely ruined our last nighttime outing, and all three of us had wound up serving detentions with Professor Longbottom. The Howler Dad sent after that was so loud, they probably heard it all the way in London. The twins were lucky; their mum and dad weren’t really the Howler sending types. Their mum just wrote them not to treat fanged geraniums with such disrespect because they were very useful for identifying vampires. (I asked Aunt Hermione about this because she knows everything, and she said it was complete nonsense.)

To my immense relief, this time we didn’t see Peeves, or any of the castle ghosts, either. I supposed they were busy haunting people, or saying _boo_ , or doing whatever it was ghosts did on Halloween. Mr. Janey, the caretaker, was a crabby old loon, but he left us alone as long as we didn’t make a mess, and when desperate, we bribed him with butterbeer. Therefore, we were neither keen to stumble upon him, nor terrified by the possibility. As it turned out, we didn’t see a single soul in the castle, and by the time we made it through the entrance hall and out onto the grounds, the hair was standing up on the back of my neck. The moon was full, and it shone lamp-like over the grounds, painting shadows over all it did not touch.

“Wow, that’s a Harvest Moon alright,” Lorcan whispered.

“It’s not the Harvest Moon,” I informed him. “It’s the Hunter’s Moon.”

“The what now?”

“The Hunter’s Moon. The next full moon after the autumn equinox.”

“Sounds promising,” Lys said. “Maybe it will bring us luck on our quest.”

I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way, but I mumbled something that passed for agreement. Once Lysander made up his mind, there was honestly no point arguing with him, so why bother? Instead, I peered across the grounds toward the edge of the forest. The trees looked haggard and twisted in the eerie light, like monsters baring fangs and claws to ward off intruders. I wondered how badly the twins would take the Mickey out of me if I decided to turn back before we made it to the tree line, and immediately thought better of it. They’d pester and tease until the day I died if I did that. It seemed I’d dug my own grave, and now I had to lie in.

I spared a moment to regret my choice of analogy.

We trooped cautiously across grass made spongy by an afternoon rain shower, and each crumpling blade of grass underfoot seemed to carry like the hoot of an owl in the deathly silence. So far, I realized, I hadn’t caught the slightest sign of a Chimaera, or any other dangerous beast. Maybe the boys were mistaken. Or, maybe they were just having a go at me for a Halloween prank. I exhaled heavily, relieved at the thought that I might not actually encounter a fire-breathing lion dragon goat thing. They really were strange creatures. It was almost as if a toddler had sat down with a set of play animals, smashed them to bits, and then put them back together in whatever way caught their fancy.

We came to a halt when we reached the edge of the woods, standing in the entangled shadows of the branches that stretched along the grass, reaching their gnarled hands away from where their roots trapped them, toward castle and sky. I peered at my two friends in the darkness. Lorcan was smiling excitedly, while Lysander’s pinched lips and slit eyes were clear signs of intense concentration. “I’ll take point,” Lys said. “Lorcan, you take the rear, and Lucy the middle. That way you can be our eyes and ears while we defend ourselves, if need be.”

He was such a bossy prat sometimes, but I didn’t mind. The fact was, I wasn’t much good at defensive magic. I was good with charms and transfiguration, not the things that would be most helpful in defeating a dragon or a werewolf if such a thing appeared. At the very thought of such creatures, a chill ran up my spine, and then Lys was taking my hand and dragging me behind him into the forest. The fallen leaves slipped and wrinkled underfoot, and the noise seemed horrifically loud until I thought to put a silencing charm on all our shoes. Then we plunged back into quiet, and I found immediately that I missed the sound. We’d been walking for some time, winding our way deeper and deeper into the dense maze of trees, when a warm glow in the underbrush caught my eye.

I pointed. “What’s that?”

“Where?” Lorcan looked around like an overly excitable puppy, until he spotted the embers in the dirt.

Ahead of him, Lysander was already switching his course to make his way to the source of the strange glow. I bit my lip and followed after him. My heart beat so loudly and quickly, I felt sure the boys would hear it and think I was a coward. (Well, I was a coward, wasn’t I?) Still, I dug my fingernails into my palms and walked forward among the fallen leaves, one muffled step at a time.

“I think I’ve found – oh my God.” Lysander’s face paled in the bright moonlight, and when I came even with him my stomach dropped and I immediately understood the reason for his silence. The three of us stood on moss-strewn forest floor, but in front of us, stretching off into the darkness, lay a path of embers. The charred, glowing remains of what had once been plants and trees were scattered brutally on the ground, forming a faintly orange path through the normally thick underbrush. It was beautiful, but also utterly haunting.

Beside me, Lorcan felt mutely for my hand, and I let him take it and squeezed.

We stood there quietly for a moment, taking in the road of embers before us, until Lys, being infinitely stubborn, said, “Well, I suppose this will make our search easier.”

“I think I want to go back,” I said. He had to be out of his mind, honestly.

“You’re coming,” Lys stated, as if it were an undeniable fact. “But we can’t walk on the path – it would burn straight through our trainers. We’ll follow along the side.”

“I want to go back,” I repeated.

“Lucy, do you have any clue which way the castle is from here?”

I turned around on the spot, trying to orient myself, and found that he was right. There weren’t even any stars to guide me, since the unusually bright moon outshone them.

“Come on, Lucy,” Lorcan prodded, “It’ll be an adventure.”

I would forever wonder what about me had made him think I’d find this a convincing argument. It would have taken only a glance my way to determine that I wasn’t exactly standing in line at Adventures R’ Us. I wanted to slap myself. I should have been back in Ravenclaw Tower, asleep, or perhaps reading a novel and sipping a mug of hot chocolate. That was my idea of a night well spent. “Why am I even friends with you two?” I muttered under my breath.

“You know you love us,” Lorcan grinned, and then he moved to the side of the odd path and led the way through the trees.

The path seemed to go on forever, and although at first my nerves were on high alert, jumping at every sound and worrying constantly over what the next moment would bring, after a while I grew used to the odd journey. It soon became clear that this was not a straight route forward, as it had originally seemed, but rather a twisting, turning maze with a fair share of dead ends. We felt these roadblocks before we saw them. A fierce, pulsing heat would grow stronger and stronger, and then we’d take a turn and find ourselves face to face with a wall of raging fire that spat and roared as dangerously as any dragon. It was hot, the most intense heat I’d ever encountered. I was sweating buckets.

After what felt like hours – though I had no idea how long it had actually been – we encountered the familiar dead-end sensation once more. However, just as we were preparing to turn back, a sound echoed riotously through the canopy: a roar that shook the earth and pounded though my bones like thunder. I’m sorry to say that at that moment, all three of us did the absolute worst thing we could have done in such a situation. We stopped moving and turned around, searching for the source of the noise as if we didn’t already know bloody well what it was.

A Chimaera. I was terrified, obviously, but for the first split second that I saw the creature, my blood stopped rushing, my thoughts dissipated, and the only thing that remained was this glorious creature. It was stunning. Its face was long and surprisingly intelligent, with great amber eyes that reflected the blaze of the fire all around, and its golden mane billowed outward like tendrils of some brilliant sun. Behind this, the beast’s stubby-legged body contrasted oddly with its magnificent front. The spiked dragon-like tail that spiraled out behind it was so elegantly horrifying, it would have been chilling if the heat weren’t so all-consuming. I took in the sight, and as the creature’s level gaze met my eyes, I screamed.

Suddenly, Lysander, Lorcan, and I were running. We ran faster than I’d ever run, faster than I had even known I was capable of running before that moment. In short, we ran as if our lives depended on it – and they did. The Chimaera was hot on our trail, literally, and another earth-shaking roar reverberated around us as the trees we’d just passed exploded into flame. Desperate, and perhaps thinking more clearly than I was, Lys rounded a bend and threw himself away from the fiery path and into the unadulterated woods. Lorcan and I immediately followed suit, tumbling to the ground and rolling this way and that to put out the flames that licked at our edges.

When this was accomplished, we spared ourselves a moment of relief from the exhausting race, wiping our sweaty foreheads on our shirts. I gasped for breath and allowed myself to lay back, eyes roaming a sky grey with smoke. The Chimaera growled in the distance, and the sound of its pursuit came closer with each moment.

Lysander got up and dusted off his sooty clothes. “Ready to run again?” He asked.

I grimaced and stood. “I hate you both.”

Lorcan smirked and slapped me on the back. “Hey, look at it this way – as long as we don't die, this is going to be one hell of a story.”* Then he sped forward, before I could tell him off. Cheeky prat.

Again, we ran. Our evasion tactic worked for a while, and I thought we might make it back in one piece, until we burst through a thicket of pine trees into a clearing and found ourselves entirely surrounded by fire. “Retreat!” Lys commanded, but as we turned back toward our entrance, that too burst into flame, and all at once the Chimaera was there in front of us.

“Bugger,” Lorcan said, which may very well have been the greatest understatement of the century.

This was the end. We were going to die. I was absolutely certain of it. A memory came surging back to me, my mum’s voice reading from the big book of tales from around the world I used to beg for each night. _Only the great hero Bellerophon, alone among all others, ever succeeded in defeating that terrible creature, the Chimaera._

Bugger indeed.

The great beast before us was pacing and growling incessantly. She seemed to be trying to decide which of us to kill first. Her legs coiled, preparing for a monstrous leap, and my entire being suddenly filled with an unendurable desire to live. I was only eleven years old, for Merlin’s sake! Without stopping to think, without daring to breathe or blink, I pulled my wand out of my pocket, pointed at the wall of fire, and shouted, “ _Aguamenti!_ ”

The jet of water burst forth from my wand, creating a doorway through the flames, and without needing to be told, the boys flew through it behind me, running once again with reckless abandon and listening with dread to the ever-approaching roars and hoof-steeps of the Chimaera.

It didn’t take long for the savage thing to catch up to us again. We scrambled desperately through the brambles, tripping on tree roots and grabbing at branches in earnest. We struggled through the forest for several minutes, until we found ourselves at the edge of a rather alarming cliff. The monster stole its chance and, making a tremendous jump, landed nearly on top of us. I screamed, Lysander covered his face with his hands – I suspected he was crying – and Lorcan burst out with a tremendous yell. “Jump in the lake!”

“What?” Lys and I chorused.

“Jump in the sodding lake!” Lorcan screamed again. Then, with a running start, he leapt off the cliff into the open air below.

It took only a moment of consideration – jump off a cliff or be eaten by a Chimaera? – and then I was falling.

My limbs were jelly, and they flailed hopelessly as the air rushed past. It seemed to take a long time to hit bottom, and I found myself wondering if this would be simply a different method of death. Perhaps being burnt to a crisp and eaten alive wouldn’t have been so bad. No, no, never mind. I’d fall to the depths of Hell rather than face that creature again. When I finally collided with something, it was not the hot furnace of Hell, but the icy waves of the Black Lake. For a moment I was forced under the surface by the momentum of my fall, but I managed to swim up again. The water stung on the many burns I’d pick up in the woods, and after the brilliant corridors of fire we’d raced through, I had to blink my eyes for several minutes before I could make out Lys and Lorcan treading nearby.

“Alright, Lucy?” Lys asked.

“Alive, which is more than I expected.” I nearly laughed. The relief was overwhelming.

Lorcan splashed at me, and I squealed in protest. His blonde hair hung nearly to his shoulders when wet, I noticed.

“Let’s get back to inside,” I said, relishing the sight of the castle further along the lake. “I think I’d sell my soul to be in bed right now.”

We swam in slow strokes along the shoreline. None of us mentioned it, but the thought of awakening the giant squid after what we’d already been through was more than any of us could handle. By the time we reached the far side of the lake and jogged back to the entrance hall, the sky was growing faintly lighter in the east. I felt ready to collapse on the spot. As we walked back to the tower, the boys were already reliving our adventure, any past anxiety about being caught out of bounds long since forgotten. “And Lucy,” Lorcan said, grinning from ear to ear, “you were bloody brilliant! If you hadn’t thought of _aguamenti_ who knows what would have happened?” And on he went.

I let their conversation wash over me, paying little attention, but I felt a rush of pride all the same. However much I wanted to strangle him for his stupidity, Lorcan had been right. It really was one _hell_ of a story. Fighting off a smile, I trailed the boys into the common room and slipped off to bed.

**Author's Note:**

> JKR owns the Potterverse. All hail the queen!
> 
> *The line "as long as we don't die, this is going to be one hell of a story" is from John Green's Paper Towns. 
> 
> Reviews loved and feedback welcome! Thank you for reading! And a huge thank you to Ysh for the awesome beta-ing skills! *hug*


End file.
